


tie me to your longing, I'll tie you down to mine

by nextgreatadventure



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Masturbation, Non-Linear Narrative, Season 2 Canon Divergence, Voyeurism, a feeling or two, do you like to watch or be watched? both, obsessive possessive women who want to kill and screw each other, set during some season 2 handwavey time period, this is mostly just sex, weird supernatural connections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:40:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24001489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nextgreatadventure/pseuds/nextgreatadventure
Summary: These are all things Villanelle remembers. She doesn’t know if any of it meant love, but surely it meantsomething. It was not nothing.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 57
Kudos: 362





	tie me to your longing, I'll tie you down to mine

—  
  
  
  
_and in the morning, let me see those eyes  
tie me to your longing, I'll tie you down to mine_  
-emily wells  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“When you met your wife,” Villanelle asks, “how did you know that it was love?”

The credits are rolling on the TV screen and the sunset is a dusky sherbet pink peeping from beyond the curtained windows.

Villanelle has her head on Konstantin’s shoulder, eyes closed. She’s not asleep, but almost, almost. She hopes she has pleasant dreams.

She feels and hears Konstantin sigh, how his body swells and takes her head up and down gently with it. She thinks he disapproves of the reason she asked, but she also thinks she caught him off guard enough that he is suddenly nostalgic, missing his annoying family, and may just answer her truthfully this once.

She is right:

“At first, it was that I could not be anywhere without her,” he tells Villanelle. “All the time, I wanted her beside me.”

“And did she want to be beside you?” If Konstantin detects a hint of incredulousness in this question, he does not comment on it.

A few moments pass, and then Konstantin says, “I waited. I let her come to me first. This is how I knew. You understand?”

Villanelle ponders this. “Mmm. And what is it between you, now that you’re dead?”

Konstantin moves fluidly, replacing his body with a cushion. He swipes some of Villanelle’s hair away from where it had wandered into her mouth with his fingers (like she is a small child) and heaves another heavy, troubled sigh (also like she is a small child).

“Now, I only care that she is safe,” he says. “Love changes, you see? With time. It becomes less about yourself. More about the other person. If you can imagine that.”

Villanelle buries her nose into the cushion. “It becomes less about yourself,” she repeats mockingly, sleepily, testing out the words and attempting to decode the meaning behind them. 

Villanelle thinks of Anna, the way she would shiver when she came secretly against Villanelle’s hands in their chair in Anna’s home. Wasn’t that for the both of them? And then Villanelle considers, with ever present detachment, the jealousy—it would be called jealousy, yes? to want something so badly for only yourself, that no one else may have it?—that had stained her so bitter that when she could finally stand it no longer, Anna had stared at those same hands, smeared with her husband’s blood, in such a horrified way that it made Villanelle boil over with anger. _I did this for you, this was supposed to be a celebration!_ she had screamed across the balloon-strewn floor, and Anna’s face had descended swiftly into some finality that Villanelle could not name. The last words Anna had said to her were in Russian, which they had never spoken together: _No, Oksana, everything you do is for you, and you alone_. To this day, Villanelle struggles to understand why that part was wrong, why it ever mattered.

Months ago, in the flat in Moscow, the last time they would see one another, Villanelle remembers noticing the pleasant time-creases around Anna’s eyes that were not there before and how Anna’s blood was the same color as her husband’s when it pooled across the same wood floor and—how the old clock beside the chair was _still_ wrong. Even all those years later. 

These are all things Villanelle remembers. She doesn’t know if any of it meant love, but surely it meant _something_. It was not nothing.

Konstantin interrupts her thoughts: “I’ll see you in the morning, OK? It is going to be a big day. Eat a good breakfast.”

Villanelle mumbles. When the key latch closes on the hotel room door, Villanelle’s thoughts turn instead (inevitably) to Eve. Villanelle has never had to prove anything to Eve, everything Villanelle does for Eve is because she _wants_ , is pulled, to. Maybe because Eve sees her, maybe even in the same intimate ways that Villanelle sees Eve herself. She thinks about how they meet in the middle, over and over again. How surprising that is to Villanelle, and how mystifying. It was never like that with Anna. Anna made Villanelle reach for her until her bones split apart, and even then, Anna had never closed that gap between them. Eve reaches back. Eve makes Villanelle _want_ , want in whole sentences made up of a language she knows she cannot learn, but can perhaps, one day, tune her ear to recognize. Even that gnashing, possessive jealousy that Villanelle was born with feels like an entirely new beast when it howls at the sight of Eve. Calmer, maybe. Willing. Willing to pause, willing to _wait_. 

Is that love? It feels—

Villanelle thinks of how she will walk around forever now with a small token from Eve carved into her body like initials into a tree root (nobody has ever given her a gift like that before, so permanent, so enduring) and her compulsive heart constricts, a fist clenched tightly, pleasurably, inside her chest. When it finally relaxes, Villanelle is sleepy again. 

_It is different, this time,_ she thinks, about Eve. She is almost certain it’s different this time.

( _Even when it is about me, it is about her,_ is the last conclusion Villanelle comes to before her breath evens out. _We are the same._

 _I know,_ Villanelle thinks she hears Anna respond sadly, right before she drifts off to sleep. _I know._ )  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
That Eve has put a _professional hit out on herself_ to get Villanelle’s attention just long enough to ask for her help _with her day job_ is naive and stupid and dangerous and dramatic and frankly, only surprising until she looks into Eve’s wide eyes, and then suddenly it makes perfect sense. The more Villanelle thinks about it (blank-faced as she watches Eve tearfully consume three powdered lactose tablets) the more it reveals itself as Eve’s true brand of insanity. And this is _Villanelle_ thinking these things! Anyway. She does not think things through, this Eve. She does not do what is expected, or normal. It is a good thing Eve was not born in Russia, she would have made a terrible communist.

Villanelle could demand a contract be drawn up for her services, but instead, she unsheathes her weapon and slides her hand around Eve’s waist. Villanelle is sometimes old fashioned this way.

“Will you give me everything I want?”

“...Yes,” Eve whispers.

Villanelle grins. “Oh, but I am not talking about the money, Eve.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“So what? I gave you your answer.”

Villanelle twists the blade tip gently against Eve’s rib. _Push, provoke, take advantage,_ she thinks. She may not get this chance again. She wonders how far Eve will let her go with it.

“What if I wanted you to give yourself to me, right here, right now? What if that was my price?” Villanelle asks, without breaking eye contact. “What if I wanted to fuck you against your sink with the hilt of this ridiculous knife?”

Eve just...exhales. Then, with a slight shrug, she says, “I mean. Okay, yeah. Sure.”

Villanelle blinks. Narrows her eyes, distaste for this very confusing, very _American_ , very _Eve_ response curling her tongue. A yes that does not feel like a yes. A yes that feels like a trap. Why is Eve like this? Will she ever understand? “That is not very enthusiastic consent, Eve. I thought you wanted my help.”

Eve’s breath is still shallow, but she relaxes minutely in Villanelle’s arms. “I do,” she says. “But I’d rather you use your hands. God knows where that knife has been.”

And Eve _smiles_ , but she’s trembling, and it is so brave, so _disarming_ that the blade slips a few unwitting inches because Villanelle has missed a step here somewhere. She is suddenly breathless, fixated on the attractive edges of Eve’s lips, jaw, throat, hair, voice, breath.

“I’m joking,” Eve whispers, just a few beats too late. “Jesus. Obviously.”

“Mmm,” Villanelle responds at length, a rush of exhilaration clouding her like sweet, dizzying smoke. “I am not.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Do you still think about me?” Eve’s voice is conversational from the backseat, though it is perhaps an octave lower than usual—and oh, she knows it. “When you, you know.”

They’re parked outside an enormous mansion in West London waiting for Carolyn. The soirée is probably still in full swing—Villanelle doesn’t know, doesn’t care. As far as she’s concerned she had only one job tonight (not counting the one MI6 is paying her for, which included the suit and driver’s hat she’s currently wearing) and that was picking up Eve (and the slinky black sequined dress _she’s_ currently wearing). Villanelle thinks there may have been something else about doing nothing rash and awaiting further instructions, blah, blah, whatever, but—

It was definitely this. This is the only thing she’s been waiting for. This is the only thing she’s ever been waiting for. 

“When I what, Eve?” Villanelle feigns polite confusion. 

Eve’s dark eyes narrow. “When you...masturbate.”

“Ah.” 

Eve blinks once in the rear view mirror.

“Do you think about me, Eve? Each time you’re with Niko? Do you think about me when you’re alone?”

“I asked you first,” Eve says, glancing out the window.

But it’s not a no. Villanelle’s brows pinch together impatiently. “What is that old saying, hmm? Do not ask the question if you will not like the answer?”

There’s a small, smooth rustle from the backseat. Eve may have unfolded and folded her legs again. Eve is framed in the rear view mirror from the belly up, and a pulse is quickening at her neck where the moonlight slices through it. Villanelle hasn’t blinked away from the mirror in sixty seconds, sixty one seconds, sixty two seconds— she’d rather forgo payment for a full evening’s work than miss a second of the thrilling shadow-play across Eve’s skin.

Moments pass, and Villanelle wonders if they’re both thinking the same things (tinted windows, locks) perhaps doing the same math about how likely they are to be interrupted in the next three to thirty minutes. Doing the math to see if they might have the time, right now, for where this conversation will inevitably take them.

Eve seems to come to some sort of conclusion all on her own. “I think I’ll like the answer just fine,” she says. “But you know, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to tell me. I want you to show me.”

Villanelle watches her own eyes dilate in the rearview mirror. Smiles politely. Eve has given her the inch, now she’s going to take many, many miles. “I don’t know what you mean, _boss_ ,” she says, puzzled. “Will you explain in a little more _detail_ , what it is you’d like me to do, exactly?”

A muscle in Eve’s jaw flickers dangerously. She doesn’t crack. A few moments pass before she does anything at all.

“I want you to touch yourself,” she says, softly. “Right now. And I want you to think about me while you do it.”

Villanelle raises one eyebrow, very slowly. 

“I want you to do it while I watch you,” Eve continues, as though Villanelle had really needed the clarification. “That’s what I’d like you to do.”

And Villanelle simply cannot contain the bark of laughter any longer. “Oh, you _really_ like to give me orders, don’t you, Eve? Does it make you hot, to think that I might obey you for once, for _free_ , just because I want you so much? To think you could control me with that knowledge, even just a little?”

Eve flushes. “Piss off.” Her hand reaches for the door handle. 

“Don’t,” Villanelle says quickly, hands already at her belt buckle. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it! Jeez, so testy, Eve.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Villanelle has her left hand in a tight fist around the bottom of the steering wheel. The driver’s hat of her costume has been thrown carelessly into the passenger’s seat and her hair must be a mess, a very _attractive_ mess, but she doesn’t care about that because her other hand is moving deep past her open belt buckle and Eve is still watching behind her.

“I can’t imagine you’re always this quiet, Villanelle,” Eve says from the backseat.

“No,” Villanelle gasps. “Not usually.”

“Okay,” Eve says. “So then let me hear you.”

Eve’s blunt voice is always just inside her head whenever she does this, but now it is suddenly so real. Villanelle cannot make up what Eve will say next, and she finds this thrilling (possibly disappointing, but mostly thrilling). Villanelle’s hips arch slightly off the seat and she groans, out loud, just once. 

There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then Eve makes a very soft, strangled noise. “Do that again,” she whispers.

So Villanelle does. She does it again, and again, and—

“Eve.”

She likes being watched like this, by Eve, just like she has always liked being watched by Eve. She likes the noise Eve just made, too, and the way Eve sounds speaking to her inside the quiet dark car. Only the two of them exist in this small, still world; there is no one else here to divide Eve’s attention. Villanelle likes it _so much_. 

“Eve, Eve, Eve. Do you know that I always pretend you are with me, when I lie down to sleep? I think about you lying beside me, I imagine you beneath me, on top of me—did you know that? I imagine you touching me, I imagine moving my hands through your hair, down your body—Oh, Eve, I know you would feel—so amazing—shit.” She doesn’t even have to exaggerate much to show off. She’s already panting, mouth dry. “I am...very close.” 

Villanelle can still see Eve in the rear view mirror when she slits her eyes open. She circles three fingertips—focuses on the red curve of Eve's open mouth, the way her breath has become shallow, betraying her very tenuous attempt to keep her cool (Villanelle commits it to memory, imagines she will touch herself many times, later, to this image—the best so far). Villanelle begins to grin, but it is wiped away when Eve suddenly leans all the way forward.

“Yes,” Eve murmurs near her ear, and Villanelle feels a rush come over her like fainting. She did not expect this. “I do feel amazing. But do you think I would ever actually let you touch me like this?” Eve’s voice is heat, a close slow sharp twisting sting, sharper than anything Villanelle has ever felt, sharper even than the knife that made Eve’s scar. “It’s not a trick question. Ask nicely and I’ll tell you. Can you do that for me, Oksana?”

(Villanelle’s ears begin to ring. _No, Oksana, everything you do is for you, and you alone—_ )

“Don’t,” Villanelle whispers, but the hand between her legs speeds up, suddenly messy and desperate. She didn’t think that Eve would really do this, reach like this, more than she ever has before. Tilt Villanelle off balance like this. Pull her apart like this. Does Eve not remember that Villanelle is _Villanelle_? Is Eve not still scared for her life, every moment she spends inside this car, every moment she spends trying to pretend she’s in control?

(But now the windows of the car are clouded with all the breath Eve has dragged from her lungs, and Villanelle is still the one with Eve’s permanent mark, and she doesn’t know anymore, doesn’t understand, all she knows is that she still wants this more than anything, more than _everything_ , but when it is over she will get even, better than even, with blades or with bullets, with her bare hands or with her very clever tongue—)

But Eve is patient and she waits, still so close, and she could probably wait forever just to win and Villanelle has never been one for waiting even if she does love winning, too.

“Please,” Villanelle chokes out, as soon as she finds it within herself. _Please, stay there, please do not leave, please let me—_

Eve leans closer. When she speaks, her voice breaks in the middle like a missed step. “I’m thinking. Tell me how badly—tell me how badly you want the answer to be yes.” 

The longer Villanelle can feel Eve’s body heat, breath and hair brush against her cheek, so alive and so close to her, so focused, so attentive, the more Villanelle begins to unravel (soon there will be nothing left of Villanelle to strip away and Oksana will be revealed, shivering and feral with hunger, and she will not will not will not let that happen). Dazedly, Villanelle notices that Eve has placed one hand against her seat, right next to her shoulder.

“So, so—very badly, I want it, to touch you,” Villanelle gasps, shudders. “But—Eve, are you going to touch me? When—when will you do it?”

This, for whatever reason, turns Eve silent. Villanelle doesn’t know why Eve goes quiet, but she is suddenly frozen, both hands rigid between her legs. She is pure reaction, now (if Eve is going to make another attempt on her life it would be Villanelle’s fault, stab me twice shame on me, or however that goes...)

Eve’s voice is very soft when she speaks again, and this is when Villanelle thinks that maybe what is unfolding between them is as much a weapon as any other. “Why do you want me to touch you?”

Villanelle huffs, almost growls. She almost laughs. She rolls her head languidly to the left, until they are eye to eye. Villanelle exhales, and Eve’s hair rustles. Eve’s eyes flick to Villanelle’s mouth, dark eyelashes fluttering, and Villanelle is mesmerized all over again. She wishes she could unhinge her jaw and swallow Eve whole.

“Because,” Villanelle whispers. “You have to do it first. You have to come to me. Please, Eve. I have been so patient.”

Something in Eve’s eyes...changes. She leans away, and Villanelle does not understand, will never understand, and so she just...waits. She waits, chest see-sawing up and down, amazed and dazed with a very unfamiliar sort of prickling rising along her skin, which she thinks might be confusion—that she and Eve might be playing two very different games, now.

 _Do not turn cruel,_ Villanelle thinks, though she isn’t at all sure what cruelty really is when it comes right down to it, or which one of them she’s pleading with. _Do not be cruel._

“Lock the door,” Eve says, finally, and so Villanelle does. Her free hand flies across to the button on her right, and the mechanism shifts, echoing in the silent car.

Eve leans forward again and takes Villanelle’s chin in her palm. It is as immense a relief as it is a thrill. Villanelle looks directly into Eve’s dark eyes, and does not blink. 

“Keep going,” Eve says.

Villanelle does this, too. It is so much better now than it ever was inside her head.

Eve’s fingers tighten along Villanelle’s jaw. “Are you still close?”

Villanelle nods. She is always close. Eve has been flicking her gaze up and down, watching first Villanelle’s eyes, and then her mouth, and then the hand pleasuring herself. Watching Eve watching her makes Villanelle’s sense of self appear back to her distorted, singed, a wobbly reflection in an amusement park mirror on fire.

“Close your eyes,” Eve tells her.

Villanelle frowns. Looking into Eve’s eyes has been her very favorite part of...whatever this is. She thinks Eve’s eyes tonight have given her more knowledge than any mark, any lover, any movie she’s ever watched, all so intently, just trying to understand. “Wh—why? Why can I not look at you?”

“Because,” And Villanelle watches as Eve swiftly descends into that faraway place she cannot reach, “I just, I can’t…” 

There is so much about Eve that Villanelle cannot read or know, or _feel_ (but she wants to, oh, she _wants_ , so badly she might turn herself inside out from the longing, might even accidentally slice Eve wide open on the sharp edge of her desire if she gets too close, if she would just come a little closer…)

“Just do it,” Eve says. “For me.”

So the world goes black and red as Villanelle closes her eyelids, and three long fingers twist inside herself all at once, and her body feels like champagne still in the bottle, all trapped and shaken, shaken—

Eve’s fingers shift. Villanelle feels them slide below her earlobe instead, feels them curve against that sensitive spot along the side of her neck, and Villanelle cranes it, pushes back against Eve’s hand, amazed at her luck, bursting with it.

Villanelle is starting to see violent white patterns strike like lightning behind her eyelids when Eve leans forward and kisses her. There’s a shock of electricity that pops bright when their lips touch and Villanelle moans shamelessly, stretches her fingers deeper, deeper, and Eve’s mouth is soft and warm and slick and all Villanelle sees now is red and red and black and Eve’s teeth are a sharp, welcome surprise against Villanelle’s lips— Eve’s tongue is filling Villanelle’s mouth while her hand pins Villanelle’s neck back, back against the headrest, hard, so hard she can’t breathe, and—

Villanelle sees stars for a small eternity, gasps when Eve’s hand releases. White yellow and purple red, ice blue against black, black, more black, adrenaline rushing in her ears and chest, the pleasure radiating so wide and so quick she thinks it might spill out past the confines of her body like a tub too full of diamonds. Villanelle whines, a desperate animal bucking against Eve’s mouth, and just when Villanelle thinks that she has nothing left to feel, Eve’s hand falls from her throat, and covers her own—not the one gripping the gear shift, but the one clamped between her thighs, and Villanelle’s blood rushes inside of her all over again.

Both their chests are heaving; they are still so close that Villanelle can breathe in the air that Eve huffs out.

Villanelle thinks this must be that word, agony. Or close to it. She wishes Eve would move just two inches and put those fingers inside of her instead, or maybe her mouth, her gorgeous, panting mouth which is still slanted, crooked against her own (the thought of an orgasm given to her by Eve’s mouth makes Villanelle’s hips twist and writhe again already, and Eve pushes them back down into her seat, like this is still a game, like maybe Eve thinks this has tamed her, like maybe Eve thinks she’s actually, finally, won).

Villanelle could open her eyes and prove to Eve how wrong she is. But—love is not about what is true or untrue, love is not about what _she_ wants, Villanelle remembers. Love is about what Eve wants, and so Villanelle stays exactly where she is beneath Eve’s hands, wire-taught and glacier-still and only half-satiated and completely, utterly filled with Eve, Eve, Eve.

Somewhere outside the stillness, Eve’s fingers are sliding along her abdomen. Villanelle peeks her eyes open; her shirt has ridden up and come unbuttoned and Eve has only to spread a few fingertips wide to find the scar.

She circles it slowly, and Villanelle closes her eyes again.

Several frustrating moments later, Eve’s touch disappears. Before Villanelle can open her eyes, Eve is gone. The door slams violently, and Villanelle finally hisses and withdraws her hand, cold and aching.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eve is still devouring abnormal psychology books, articles, studies, journals, notes, anything she can get her hands on. She pulls up that shitty powerpoint (comic sans? really?) Carolyn’s psycopath expert showed them, taps her index finger impatiently against the mouse, next slide, next slide, next, next, next. She’s taken in all this information before, many times. She doesn’t know what else she’s looking for, what else she could possibly be hoping to find (or prove wrong). She clicks, Oksana’s face stares back at her. She clicks away. Clicks back. Clicks away again. Circles, circles, circles, trying to make the square peg of her experience fit this round hole.

When she checks her phone a moment later, Villanelle has texted her a string of emojis: a car, a set of traffic lights, a set of eyeballs, a kissing face. She throws the phone across the room. Listens to the resounding crash.

(Insanity might be doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, but Eve never backs down from a challenge. Not if it kills her.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Maybe I’m here for your husband,” Villanelle muses, archly. “I’ve been dreaming about that moustache for months, Eve.”

Eve laughs. The fact that Eve still doesn’t seem worried at all for Niko doesn’t escape either of them. This isn’t like last time Villanelle showed up unannounced in her home (except—maybe a little it is).

Eve watches Villanelle eye the mussed up couch a few feet away in the living room, one brow raised. There’s a pillow from the bedroom and a throw blanket there, still messily draped across the arm from when Eve threw them off in frustration hours ago.

“He’s not here,” Eve informs her, simply.

“Oh no, did he _leave_ you?” Villanelle asks softly, all mock concern and pouty lips. Eve wants to sink her teeth into them until they bleed. “Poor baby. And you’re still sleeping on the couch because…? Old habits, and all of that?”

Eve narrows her eyes.

“Because even though he’s not here,” Villanelle ventures, “you still feel so guilty that you can’t stop thinking about someone else in his bed?” The next sentence comes out in a mocking accent, some heightened approximation of Eve’s own: “Because you are _such_ a good wife?”

Eve had been switching laundry loads of all fucking things when Villanelle showed up in the shadows behind her, so she’s wearing underwear, Niko’s old Composting Is Heaps Of Fun tshirt and nothing else. Her hair is a bird’s nest and she’s got shadows beneath her eyes, but she cocks her hip to the side anyway and leans back against the open dryer like everything is still perfectly in her control. 

“Let me guess,” Villanelle is saying in her normal voice. “It is someone you work with, someone much sexier, much, _much_ younger—“

“Unless you’re going to use that big mouth to tell me what you came here for,” Eve interrupts, “you can shut the hell up.”

Villanelle quirks the other brow.

At least eleven seconds pass in utter silence. 

Eve almost laughs again. She has the wild impulse to begin trashing her own laundry room. She and Villanelle do _not_ know how to talk to each other.

“We’re...uneven,” Villanelle hedges, finally. “And I do not ever like to leave a score unsettled. So answer the question, Eve.”

“Hmm, remind me?” Eve’s eyes flick around Villanelle’s profile for a weapon, because after all, she realizes, the score is actually two to zero, not one.

Villanelle is six feet away from Eve, and now suddenly five. “Do you still think about me?” Four, three. “In his bed? Does he know what you did to me, the things you said to me that night? Is that why he left?”

Eve’s heart thumps hard, just once, like a fastball thrown vaguely in the direction of her rib cage. Her vision begins to dissolve around the edges again, until only the scene directly before her is left still in focus. Another game over screen, because these days no matter how hard she plays at her nice, normal life, she never gets very far. Game over. Start again. And again, and over again. What even for? Because she’s a good person?

Is she? 

Really?

And Eve is...so tired. She works the muscles in her jaw, biding some time. She remembers the mug she shattered against the front door as Niko slammed it. She remembers the taste of Villanelle’s mouth in the front seat of that car.

(Game over. Do you want to play again?)

“No,” Eve says, slowly. “He doesn’t, and it isn’t.” It is late, the rest of the world is not awake, and the way Villanelle’s eyes are trailing her body—more skin than clothes, for once—makes her certain she’ll never get to sleep again. “But I still think about you. When I’m alone. When I’m getting dressed, or undressed. When I’m in the shower. On the tube...at my desk. I think about you when I’m walking down the street. I think about you when I’m cooking dinner or on the phone or working or just—trying to take a goddamn break...”

Villanelle is stepping closer, but Eve holds her hand out. “Don’t.”

The truth is, she does feel guilty. Her marriage is no longer that, because Niko has been gone for four weeks. She wakes up every morning and looks at herself in the mirror, looks long and hard. She feels guilt, yes, for so many things, but she just...cannot bring herself to care. The jealousy, the rage, the monotony— these are the things that she cannot stand, cannot live with.

Eve breathes out deeply. She closes her eyes, leans back into the warm dryer, and then opens them. When she runs a hand slowly through her hair, she catches a twitch of want in the fingers of Villanelle’s right hand, and elongates the gesture.

“If I settle up, will you stop asking questions?”

Villanelle laughs. “What, do you—“ But then she stops, presumably because Eve has started to move her hands from her hair to the waistband of her underwear. “Yes,” Villanelle finishes breathlessly.

“Good,” Eve manages, and slides her fingers inside. It’s both awkward and not awkward all, touching herself while Villanelle watches, hungry, fixated. It’s thrilling, it is immediate, just like last time, even though she was on the other side of this, then. She leans her weight back into the dryer and spreads her legs slightly.

“Are you as wet as I was?” Villanelle whispers, the hint of a dazed, knowing smile in just her voice, and it makes Eve feel irritated and gunned down by embarrassment and so fucking good.

“Are _you_?” Eve shoots back impulsively.

“For you, always,” Villanelle says. “So how about I touch myself also?”

“No,” Eve snaps. Her fingertips draw tight lines, over and over; she hasn’t taken her underwear off, but Villanelle’s eyes are glued to her face anyway. “It’s good for you. To not get what you want.”

“Oh, except that I want this too, Eve.”

“Shut up,” Eve says. “Just. Don’t talk. Just look at me.” She wants Villanelle’s undivided attention. She wants that hyperfocus on her, and her alone. She already has so much of it but she wants more, wants it all. It is selfish and reckless and so unbelievably stupid and she just cannot, _cannot_ care anymore.

It’s stupid, too, how close she is already, just from weeks (month, years) of existing inside of this charged emptiness, and Eve hates it, she hates how one hand scrambles for purchase on the fucking dryer and the other thrusts hard, and fast, and deep, and Eve looks straight into the blackness of Villanelle’s eyes, staring straight back at her, until she just, can’t, can’t, can’t anymore—  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Are we even now?” Eve asks, still trembling, once she can even remotely compose herself again.

Villanelle is flushed and breathing heavily, like she’s the one that just got off in thirty seconds flat with an almost too captivated audience of one (Eve has _never_ come that quickly before in her life, doesn’t think she ever will again). Villanelle swallows thickly. Shrugs, then nods, but all uncharacteristically sluggishly, and Eve’s chest swells slightly with pride before she stomps it the fuck out.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Maybe all this time, in all these ways, they have just been trying to consume each other entirely, small piece by small piece. Trying to make some sense of it that way, their whitehot, livewire, absolute joke of a “relationship”. Consuming your enemies is an ancient cannibalistic tradition, after all.

They are like in that game, biting at apples bobbing in a pail of water, each of them less concerned with drowning than with winning. Thrashing, straining, tearing blindly with their teeth, and the thing is—their hands have been tied behind their backs this whole time, but the rope is starting to get very, _very_ loose.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“They will always try to manipulate us, won’t they?” Villanelle says by way of greeting. “They will try to use us until we are dry.” 

She sounds a strange mixture of confused, thoughtful, and vengeful. This is a stark contrast to last time they exchanged words on the topic, back when Villanelle couldn’t care less who she worked for as long as the job was fun and paid her well enough to enable such expensive, flamboyant tastes. Eve wonders what has happened to Villanelle since then, what woke her up. Was it working alongside her at MI6 these last months? Or was it before that? Perhaps Villanelle is thinking of them both: MI6 and The Twelve (whoever they are) have been shady bastards since the dawn of time, along with countless other man-made pillars of power. Perhaps they really are all the same, at the very highest top.

Or maybe it was (literally) being stabbed (metaphorically) in the back by a single trusted source that jaded Villanelle. Eve is, of course, the likely culprit for that one. Maybe she should finally own the blame, too.

But Eve doesn’t respond, just stares at Villanelle in the doorway. There’s red makeup worn away at Villanelle’s lips and the apples of her cheeks and she’s wearing the most beautiful outfit Eve has ever seen, hair down, gathered to one shoulder. She’s barefoot in Eve’s bedroom because of course she’s barefoot in Eve’s bedroom, and Eve is wearing barely anything at all.

“And our score will never be even, will it, Eve? Not really. So the world is a bit shit no matter how you slice it.”

“Yeah,” Eve shrugs a resigned shoulder. Then she meets Villanelle’s gaze. “So maybe we just...light it all up. Watch it burn, you and me. Disappear into the night.”

Villanelle’s slow, arresting, insane smile will haunt Eve for years to come.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Villanelle still hovers in the doorway, silent. Eve is still staring. There is something about tonight, something in the air, something different. A turned table. So Eve throws caution to the wind and flips the rest of them:

“If I wanted to fuck you,” she says, and her voice is more a rasp than a voice, “would you show me how?” 

She supposes it’s the same way she would ask Villanelle about killing someone. _If I wanted to commit a spectacular murder, would you show me how?_ Eve knows how to kill someone, theoretically, and theoretically knows how to do it well. But the point is in conceding. The point is in saying it out loud for both of them to hear.

Villanelle’s pupils are blown wide. She takes her time answering. Her voice is very calm. “I would tell you to touch me like you touch yourself,” she says. “Easy. I have seen you do it.”

“What if you didn’t like it?”

Villanelle doesn’t blink. “I will like it, Eve.”

Eve turns her chin up slightly. She rests back against the headboard of the bed, slowly opens up her legs to make room. “Then take off your dress,” she tells Villanelle. “And come here.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eve has never had this, has never felt this dizzying, languid sort of power before. She had the night in the car, but _this_... 

It is incredibly intimate, too, more intimate than she’s ready for—Villanelle vulnerable, cradling all her weight back into Eve, body lithe and strong and soft and still like something you’d pay a fortune to see carved from marble in Florence, and Villanelle’s hands laced around Eve’s wrists, like they’re breakaway handcuffs, like they’re making a fucking clay vase at the pottery wheel together. Villanelle’s sighs turn from sweet affected keens to mostly breath, which sound more real, and her cheek is soft and rosy and hot, tilted back, right up against Eve’s.

Eve’s arms are hooked around Villanelle’s hips and the angle is familiar, so she moves her fingers between Villanelle’s thighs like she would move them between her own, except it’s already so different. She hasn’t even gone beneath Villanelle’s champagne colored underwear yet, which is delicate and probably more expensive than Eve’s mattress, her sheets, her bed frame, the earrings Eve wears that Villanelle turns her face to nip at while she groans out loud into the empty spaces of Eve’s bedroom.

Villanelle writhes slightly, but Eve knows (doesn’t know _how_ she fucking knows) that she’s holding back. She knows it’s because Villanelle wants to show uncharacteristic restraint for Eve, to be still, to be patient. Villanelle wants to be _good_ for her. Doesn’t want to fly off the rails or run her mouth or mess this up. Their trust is a tightrope walk that has never actually existed but Villanelle is _trying_ , or trying to pretend, at least for just now, at least for just this moment. Eve’s chest swells to make room for the bizarre feeling.

“Jesus,” Eve murmurs, as Villanelle’s teeth catch her earlobe. “I’ve never seen you so well behaved.” Villanelle groan-gasps so very softly in response and Eve feels propelled by this, slips the underwear to the side like she’s done thousands of times to herself and slides most fingers of both hands beneath it. Inside, Villanelle is silkier than the fabric, and so fucking wet, coating Eve’s fingers immediately, and this is different, too, feeling without _feeling_ —Villanelle stops breathing, briefly; Eve can feel the breath catch between the strong shoulder blades that press back, hard, into her chest. 

“Breathe,” Eve says, and Villanelle releases it, like she was just waiting for permission. 

With the last tendril of this exhale Villanelle whispers, “Do you feel how much my body wants you, Eve?” 

Eve does, a chemical rush so heady it seems to sizzle and evaporate on her skin (it doesn’t matter how much of this is a show—it feels real enough). She has only a little idea of what she’s doing, both in the literal and existential sense, except she finds that the moment she empties her mind of thought, the movements come to her. The arousal is so acute that it guides her, pulls words from her mouth to hiss into Villanelle’s ear. Eve is discovering a thousand new sensations, a thousand new feelings with each passing moment (not all of them welcome or good, but all of them shattering) and she’s on fire with it.

She slides a wet hand up the length of Villanelle’s side now, past the thin pink scar she already made and explored from the backseat of a car a lifetime ago, curves beneath Villanelle’s lace scrap of a bra, sinks her fingernails into a soft, full breast. She feels a hard nipple press back against her palm and rolls across it, over and over again.

Villanelle’s back arches desperately, silent but for another wild breath caught and released. The movement presses Villanelle back, back into the center of Eve’s legs, building the pressure there. Eve searches Villanelle’s body for as long as she wants to, and Villanelle lets her, lets her explore, take, do anything, but Eve is nothing if not impatient, nothing if not greedy, reckless, bold, impulsive, instinctive, and it isn’t long until she’s filling Villanelle slowly with her fingers, one, two, then three, smearing her lips against Villanelle’s throat in a sigh. “What else do you want right now, Villanelle?”

Villanelle moans, digs her beautiful, deadly hands into Eve’s sheets. She opens her mouth and says, with some difficulty, “More.”

“More what?”

“Everything,” Villanelle huffs. “Anything.”

“Be specific.”

“Fingers, Eve,” Villanelle lands on, gasping. She doesn’t sound frustrated, just awed, straining against her self imposed discipline. Lavishing mindlessly in Eve’s attention. Her long bare legs seem to go on forever—they’re open for Eve but squirming slightly for leverage, for just the smallest amount of purchase against the mattress. “More of them. Please.”

So Eve uncups Villanelle’s breast, slides those fingers up the column of her exposed throat and into her open mouth instead. Villanelle whimpers but immediately adapts, curls her warm tongue around them, begins to suck on them intently while her hips rock just so against Eve’s other hand, letting Eve set their rhythm and Eve—Eve feels absolutely breathless, rootless, obscene, terrified by the black and endless depths of both their desires. Terrified by how much of herself she has lost to Villanelle already, and worse, how much of it she has found.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“How many times have you thought about me doing this to you?” Eve asks quietly, after. She has no idea how much time has passed, she knows only that she was voracious and starving until only moments ago, and now, in this moment, she is less so.

They’ve asked variations of this question to each other so many times she’s lost count, and in so many different ways, _do you, have you, are you, would you, to me, about me, with me, tell me_. Eve wonders if it stems from that primordial drive to understand the way they have invaded one another, the way they have inexplicably found parts of a whole in one another, mirrors like roots, eyes like branches.

“Thousands,” Villanelle murmurs. 

Eve presses her forehead to the soft, sweat-slick skin of Villanelle’s neck and jaw. Villanelle reaches up and behind, winds a fistful of Eve’s hair into her hand, reverent, deliberate, like it is wild spun gold, and tugs the slightest warning.

“How many times have you thought about it, Eve? Be truthful this time.”

Eve closes her eyes. “Once for every time I thought about killing you,” she says. “Once for every time I was furious.” She can see just one side of Villanelle’s smile as she fully reclines back against Eve’s body again, long elegant arms against Eve’s bare thighs, as though Eve is a throne, as though she’s her whole kingdom.

“So, thousands,” Villanelle whispers, eyes drifting closed.

“Yes,” Eve concedes, nearly choking on the sound. Something has ripped loose inside of her, rippling, aching. She pulls her own hand through Villanelle’s long, damp hair, and breathes in (ozone, metal, a tang of blood, the bloom of lush gardens in spring). “Thousands.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eve looks down at Villanelle’s sleeping form for hours, watches her chest rise and fall. Imagines and remembers all of the terrible, unthinkable things that body has done in such a short amount of time on the earth. Imagines, remembers, all of the terrible unthinkable things that were done to her in that time. Imagines, remembers, Villanelle shuddering in her arms, stunning in ways Eve didn’t even think possible, whispering her name over and over and over again (and still, Eve has never felt more like this woman she saw once in a painting, holding a lion’s mouth open with trembling hands).

Villanelle’s head is cradled, nestled back into the crook of Eve’s shoulder. She looks so young. Eve’s chin rests gently against her temple. Maybe if she summoned all her strength, Eve could bring her hands up and snap Villanelle’s neck before Villanelle even woke up. Maybe she could dig her fingernails into the scar on her abdomen, use the thin line as a base to carve the rest of her initial into Villanelle’s skin, just in case Villanelle ever dared to forget. Maybe Eve should wake her again, make her shudder against her fingers as many more times as she could stand, flip them and use her mouth, mark her that way instead. Maybe she should finally fling herself into Villanelle’s storm, open her body to Villanelle in the bruise and shadow of this pre-dawn light. Maybe she should let Villanelle bury her, never to be found again. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Instead, Eve continues to stroke Villanelle’s hair back and back. Wonders about Villanelle’s childhood, her mother, father, siblings, what might have happened if she’d had more love, or maybe less, or maybe if she’d never existed at all. She thinks about Villanelle as a small child, bright eyes and whip smart and precocious (maybe already a growing void, even then), thinks about herself as a small child back in that too-big lonely-empty house in Connecticut, thinks about how old Bill’s child must be now, thinks about everything.

The earliest sounds of London traffic begins to rumble down the streets outside. Busses. Bakers, maybe. Bankers. Uni students stumbling home from the pubs. Stirrings of life.

“My mother used to do this.” Villanelle’s drowsy voice startles Eve from her thoughts, stills her fingers. “When I could not sleep for nightmares.”

“Mine too,” Eve says.

“That is nice,” Villanelle whispers. “See, Eve? We match in so many beautiful ways.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Look at me,” Villanelle murmurs.

“No,” Eve says. Her eyes are shut tight.

“Eve,” Villanelle repeats. “Look at me or I will stop.” 

This gives Eve pause. She sighs, the sort of resigned sigh you sigh, she supposes, right before you push open your front door to have the final fight with your husband that will end the marriage. The sigh you sigh just before you finally allow yourself to sink your hands and teeth and soul into a woman you think you might still hate, some sort of twisted Adonis half your age who has killed your friends and ruined your life and who has sunk herself into you, too, like quicksand. The sigh of the inevitable rushing in. 

Slowly, Eve’s eyelids lift, and she looks down. Villanelle is kneeling, Eve’s bare leg crooked lazily over her shoulder. When Villanelle smiles, Eve feels a baseball bat swing and crack. It stings, aches, knocks the wind right out of her. (Later, when she’s alone, she will watch the bruises take shape in wonder and she will press her fingertips into them, hard, just because she will not be able to help herself, and then she will do it again, and again and again—)

Villanelle wipes slightly at her mouth, slick and shining, before she decides she’s satisfied and leans back in. Eve’s eyes flick darkly between the muscles working in Villanelle’s jaw and the wide, wild eyes staring straight up at her.

Eve, barely coherent, thinks about two spiders in one small web. Thinks about an uneven reflection in a double edged blade. She knows that her fight or flight response is all wrong now, reverse engineered to turn her on instead of terrify her.

She doesn’t know what that means for her life, now.

Eve’s eyelids flutter; Villanelle is relentless, and the familiar pressure is building beyond Eve’s control. Mindlessly, her head hits the back of the wall again.

Villanelle stops abruptly. “Eve, I told you to look at me.”

Eve groans, gasps her frustration. “Fuck you,” she says. “God. Just fuck you.”

Eve’s fist clenches in Villanelle’s dark honey hair, a tug so sharp it sends Villanelle’s breath out in an unexpected hiss. But—Eve relaxes her grip, slowly, and meets Villanelle’s gaze again, anyway. 

Villanelle begins again in earnest. She barely blinks. Eve doesn’t know how she’s doing it but her own open eyes go slack, lust stacking onto pleasure snapping back into lust, the slowest whiplash she’s ever felt, and she watches the mercurial shifting of Villanelle’s insatiable mouth, and the flash of curling tongue, the small crease of her brow that (Eve thinks, wonders) gives just enough away. Eve is so slick it can’t be easy but Villanelle keeps hitting the same spot again and again until Eve is keening, all lit up, struggling to keep her eyes focused but also _watching_ , watching harder than she’s ever watched anything before, shuddering hips desperate to maintain the contact, and Eve is suddenly so far, far past embarrassed, or decent, or caring—

And then Villanelle’s eyes, staring back, widen fractionally. Something passes over them, light shifting across a dark room. A match lit in a frozen cellar. Eve’s seen that look before, feral and ravenous, soul-eating, and it consumes and hypnotizes her now as much as it ever did then, and so she keeps looking, not because Villanelle told her to—she looks because she _wants to see_ , drinks and drinks and lets it fill her all up, beyond whatever her body is feeling, beyond any impulses or reactions or concepts of herself, beyond shame, lets it smother and eat away at her in heaping mouthfuls until she is revealed like a vein of pure gold, until she feels so utterly broken, and disgusted, and fucking alive. 

  
  
  


(Villanelle never once looks away. Not when Eve’s skull hits the wall again, gasping, framed by the gorgeous dark mess of her hair, or when the tremors finally cool from being set ablaze and Villanelle waits patiently while Eve comes back from wherever she went. Not when Eve eventually eases her thigh away and leverages herself against the wall with a palm because her other leg is shaking too badly, not when she leans back and shoves hard into Villanelle’s shoulder with her bare foot and sends Villanelle skittering back, spits another “fuck you” even as she straddles Villanelle right there on the concrete floor of her new flat in this stupid city she’s never liked but now suddenly can’t stop thinking of as home.

“See? I am pretty good, right?” Villanelle laughs breathlessly, and Eve laughs too, in a way that seems so real, because why else would the sound lodge itself like shrapnel between Villanelle’s ribs, so small but so tenacious and so bright?

Eve doesn’t answer and so Villanelle says, “If your knees need a rest that is okay, Eve, mine are fine but then again you are old and I am very young, so—“

And then Eve kisses her, kisses her with tongue and fingertips and teeth, dirtier and more shameless than she’s been kissed in a long, long time, and that ever-starving lonely empty empty empty bored bored feral sad angry creature flutters and gnashes behind what Villanelle thinks of as her heart—and then settles again, for now, the moment Eve’s warm, impatient hand slips between her thighs.

“Asshole,” Eve murmurs from behind a half smile like a crescent moon, hung in a whole full sky only they share.

 _And that is something, right?_ Villanelle thinks, wonders, coming alive under Eve’s electric touch. _That is not nothing.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
—_

**Author's Note:**

> i was tempted to tag this ‘canon-typical voyeurism’ but *shrug emoji* took me a YEAR to whip these snippets into some sort of shape and finally toss them into the wonderful plentiful ring of KE fics BUT ANYWAY if you made it here, thanks for reading, truly. i hope it was not an experience you deeply regret!!


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